Friday, June 20, 2014

What does Common Core math look like?

Caleb Bonham, Campus Reform’s Editor-in-chief, just released a video that illustrates the dramatic shift in mathematics education students will experience under the Common Core national standards. As the video suggests, Common Core will change dramatically the way math has been taught for decades.

Developed in 2009 by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, Common Core immediately was incentivized by the Obama administration with $4.35 billion in Race to the Top competitive grants and No Child Left Behind waivers for states that signed on.

Now, as implementation deadlines loom, states have come to realize the costs of Common Core, both in dollars and in their freedom to make decisions concerning local education policy.

On May 30, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley signed a bill exiting the state from the national standards, making South Carolina the second state, after Indiana, to do so. Two other states—Oklahoma and Missouri—have legislation awaiting approval by their governors. In all, 17 states have taken some action to push back against Common Core.

Parents, for their part, have additional concerns. What will their children be taught under Common Core?

After the standards were developed in 2009, five members of the 30-person Common Core validation committee refused to sign on to the standards. Two are content matter experts: James Milgram, professor emeritus of mathematics at Stanford University, and Sandra Stotsky, professor of education reform emerita at the University of Arkansas and co-author of Massachusetts’ highly regarded ELA standards.

As seen in the video—and articulated by Milgram—Common Core math standards do not use standard algorithms and sequencing.

According to a study conducted by the Pioneer Institute, by seventh grade, the Common Core mathematics standards leave American students two grade levels behind their peers internationally and do not prepare them for admission into highly selective four-year universities and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) programs.

During a meeting of the Massachusetts Board of Education, Jason Zimba, the lead writer for the Common Core mathematics standards, said Common Core includes “a minimal definition of college readiness” that was not designed to prepare students for admission to selective colleges.

The English standards create their own set of concerns. Stotsky argues Common Core’s “diminished emphasis on literature in the secondary grades makes it unlikely that American students will study a meaningful range of culturally and historically significant literary works before graduation. It also prevents students from acquiring a rich understanding and use of the English language. Perhaps of greatest concern, it may lead to a decreased capacity for analytical thinking.”

But there is good news. As the fall implementation deadline looms near—and the real-world impact of Common Core becomes clearer—states are reclaiming their educational decision-making authority by exiting the national standards and tests and reclaiming authority to implement strong state standards that are innovative and reflect the input of academic content experts, teachers and parents.

“Not Alone,” the White House entitled its task force report on campus sexual assaults. “Believe the Victim,” the report might as well have been called. It reflects a presumption of guilt in sexual assault cases that practically obliterates the due process rights of the accused. Students leveling accusations of assault are automatically described as “survivors” or “victims” (not alleged victims or complaining witnesses), implying that their accusations are true.

When you categorically presume the good faith, infallible memories and entirely objective perspectives of self-identified victims, you dispense with the need for cumbersome judicial or quasi-judicial proceedings and an adversary model of justice. Thus the task force effectively prohibits cross-examination of complaining witnesses: “The parties should not be allowed to cross-examine each other,” the report advises, denying the fundamental right to confront your accuser.

Every student accused of a crime or disciplinary infraction has an equal right to due process and fair adjudication of charges.Alleged victims are supposed to be protected from “hurtful questioning.” The impulse to protect actual victims from the ordeal of a cross-examination by their attackers is laudable. But by barring cross-examination, you also protect students who are mistaken or lying, and you victimize (even traumatize) students being falsely accused.

School officials are also encouraged to substitute a “single investigator” model for a hearing process, which seems a prescription for injustice. As the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education points out, pursuant to this model, “a sole administrator would be empowered to serve as detective, judge and jury, affording the accused no chance to challenge his or her accuser’s testimony.”

These “reforms” exacerbate an already dangerously unreliable approach to evaluating charges of assault. In 2011, the Department of Education issued guidelines requiring colleges and universities to employ a minimal “preponderance of evidence” standard in cases involving allegations of harassment or violence. This is the lowest possible standard of proof, which merely requires discerning a 50.01 percent chance that a charge is more likely than not to be true. It facilitates findings of guilt, which will be merited in some cases, and not others. For students wrongly accused, the consequences of a guilty finding can be as dire as a not guilty finding for students actually victimized.

These are difficult, potentially traumatizing cases for all parties involved, and not surprisingly some students complaining of sexual assault prefer not to participate in investigations or hearings. How do you evaluate their claims? If you’re the White House task force, you simply presume that they’re true: “Where a survivor does not seek a full investigation, but just wants help to move on, the school needs to respond there too.” Move on from having “survived” precisely what? You can sympathize with a victimized student who doesn’t want to pursue a claim and still wonder how school officials can respond fairly and intelligently to an accusation that hasn’t been investigated and may or may not be true.

Does this approach exaggerate or trivialize the problem at hand? Sexual assault is a serious felony, the task force and victim advocates would agree. According to the Administration, one in five students are victimized by it. Assume that estimate is accurate and imagine that 20 percent of the people in a community are suffering violent assaults. Residents would likely demand a stronger police presence and stepped up criminal prosecutions, rather than informal neighborhood councils to “adjudicate” complaints. But on campus, felony complaints are to be prosecuted informally, the way schools might prosecute violations of a dress code, without affording accused students any meaningful rights.

Justifications for this include the particular ambiguities of sexual assault charges on campus. Alleged assaults often involve alcohol, actual victims may know their attackers and, in a closed campus community, may be hesitant to press accusations against them. The irony is that these factors complicating the prosecution of campus assaults and inspiring calls for informal, non-adversarial responses to them are the same factors that, as victim advocates rightly assert, have encouraged victim blaming and prevented law enforcement authorities from taking allegations of campus assaults seriously.

The solution to the problem of ignoring sexual assault charges shouldn’t be assuming that they’re true. The “believe the victim” biases underlying the White House task force report aren’t subtle or inconsequential, but they’re not generally recognized by left of center media. The occasional students’ rights watchdog, like Brooklyn College professor KC Johnson, offers a critical, in depth analysis of the Administration’s approach, but in general reactions are dictated by partisan or ideological biases: The right has its own politically correct mandate to oppose any Obama Administration civil rights initiative. The left labors under a pop feminist mandate to reflexively believe self-identified victims of sexual assault.

Similar assumptions about victimization often dictate how people view the rights of the accused and their accusers. Compare the administration’s disregard for due process in formulating disciplinary procedures for campus sexual misconduct complaints to its critique of harsh, due process-less disciplinary practices in elementary and secondary schools.

The ‘believe the victim’ biases underlying the White House task force report aren’t subtle or inconsequential…School discipline tends to be discriminatory, at least in effect, targeting racial and ethnic minorities, so civil rights advocates outside the Administration are rallying against it, rightly seeking due process protections for students accused. But in response to allegations of sexual misconduct in colleges and universities, the same advocates generally favor a prosecutorial approach that sacrifices due process over protections for presumed victims.

How do we account for these opposing approaches to student rights? Considering elementary and secondary school disciplinary practices, the administration sympathizes with students accused. In campus sexual assault cases, it sympathizes with accusers. But rights shouldn’t be allocated on the basis of subjective sympathies, unless we want to encourage discrimination — the sort of discrimination that plagues minority students in public schools. Every student accused of a crime or disciplinary infraction has an equal right to due process and fair adjudication of charges. You’re also “Not Alone,” the Administration should guarantee students accused of sexual assault. You’re accompanied by fundamental rights.

School principals are often held accountable for student outcomes, but are limited when it comes down to making one of the most crucial decisions in determining student success—which teacher is in the classroom. Today, L.A. Superior Judge Rolf Treu struck down five teacher protection laws as unconstitutional, a decision which could make California next on a long list of states that have already reformed draconian teacher protection laws.

In the highly publicized California Superior Court case Vergara vs. California, nine public school students challenged several state laws and collective bargaining rules that severely inhibit principals' influence over school personnel, and oftentimes work against the best interest of students.

"School districts, like any other organization, need to be able to manage their workforce in a rational way with a primary focus on putting the highest quality teachers in front of students," said Students Matter attorney Theodore Boutrous during the trial's opening statements.

Under current law, California teachers are eligible for tenure, or permanent employment, after just 16 months on the job. Once granted tenure it is prohibitively costly and time-consuming to fire ineffective teachers in California, which encourages principals to instead shuffle poorly performing teachers to different schools. Usually, schools in low-income neighborhoods with the most disadvantaged students end up with these teachers.

Fortunately, this is not the case in many other parts of the nation.

Just last year, North Carolina passed legislation that removes teacher tenure in 2018, replacing "career status" with one-, two- or four-year contracts contingent upon performance. Several other states and school districts have adopted employment laws that give principals autonomy over hiring and firing practices while, importantly, providing teachers the opportunity to work with principals on employment arrangements. For instance, instead of having a district office place teachers at schools, Colorado's mutual consent hiring requires that both the teacher and school principal agree that they're a good match.

Unlike California—which currently doesn't have a process for identifying and excessing bad teachers—in 29 states teachers are held accountable for their performance and classroom ineffectiveness is grounds for dismissal. For example, in Florida and Oklahoma teachers are eligible for dismissal after two years of "unsatisfactory performance" rankings on their annual evaluations.

In the case of layoffs, California principals must give the boot to the newest teachers regardless of merit, whereas 22 states mandate seniority cannot be the only factor considered in making layoff decisions. Using a wider range of criteria, including how they perform in the classroom, places a higher value on quality teachers and allows principals to retain the best ones.

Research shows that getting good-quality teachers into all classrooms is the number one school reform we can make. A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that the most effective teachers improve student's long-term outcomes including the likelihood of going to college, earning a higher salary and living in a better neighborhood.

In his testimony last February, Harvard Economist Dr. Raj Chetty told the courts, "If we replace an ineffective teacher with a teacher of average quality the impacts would be on the same order as ending the financial crisis again and again and again, year after year. It would be a dramatic effect on the American economy in the long run."

School leaders need to be empowered to make decisions about school personnel and the Vergara case shines a spotlight on this critical issue. The court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs is a huge win that will finally require California policymakers to reform the state's antiquated teacher protection laws. The Golden State could be the next to join the nationwide movement that gives local control back to schools, and demands all students have access to a quality education.

Katie Furtick is a policy analyst at Reason Foundation. This article originally

Wednesday, June 18, 2014

Student Attacks on U.S. Teachers Up 34.5%; Record 209,800 in 2011-12 School Year

A record 209,800 primary and secondary school teachers reported being physically attacked by a student during the 2011-2012 school year, according to new data released Tuesday by the federal government.

That was up 34.5 percent from the previous record of 156,000 teachers who were attacked by students in the 2007-2008 school year.

The data was published in "Indicators of School Crime and Safety," which was released yesterday by the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics.

The 209,800 teachers who were attacked by students in 2011-2012 outnumber the population of Salt Lake City, Utah, which is 189,384.

On average, 1,175 teachers were physically attacked each day of the school year, according to data, which is derived from the NCES' Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS).

Student Attacks on Teachers Up 34.5%197,400 of the teachers who were physically attacked by a student worked in public schools. 12,400 worked in private schools.

Overall, 5.8 percent of public school teachers reported being physically attacked by a student during the year, and 2.7 percent of private school teachers reported being physically attacked by a student.

Female teachers were more likely to report being attacked by a student (6.0 percent) than male teachers (3.5 percent).

SASS is “a set of related questionnaires that collect descriptive data on the context of public and private elementary and secondary education,” according to the Indicators of School Crime and Safety: 2013, the joint report from the NCES and Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In 2011–12 SASS collected the responses of about 51,100 public school teachers and 7,100 private school teachers from across the U.S. to a questionnaire which asked teachers: “Has a student from this school ever physically attacked you?”

The survey defined a physical attack as “an actual and intentional touching or striking of another person against his or her will, or the intentional causing of bodily harm to an individual.”

ObamaCore Emerges As a Major Issue As Education Takes An Orwellian Turn

In the past week, Governors Haley of South Carolina and Fallin of Oklahoma evicted Common Core from public schools, even at the risk of losing hundreds of millions of federal dollars promised to states adopting it. Mmes. Haley and Fallin initially supported Common Core. But public outrage is forcing them to reverse course, and more states will follow. In New York, the Republican-Conservative challenger to Governor Andrew Cuomo, Robert Astorino, vows to topple Common Core if he wins in November.

Move over Obamacare. Mid-term elections will also be referendums on ObamaCore.

Contrary to what the public is told, Common Core is not about standards. It's about content - what pupils are taught. In the Social Studies Framework approved on April 29th by New York State's education authorities (but not parents), American history is presented as four centuries of racism, economic oppression, and gender discrimination. Teachers are encouraged to help students identify their differences instead of their common American identity. Gone are heroes, ideals, and American exceptionalism.

Eleventh grade American history begins with the colonial period, but Puritans and their churches, standing on virtually every New England town green to this day, are erased. Amazingly, Puritan leader John Winthrop's "city on a hill" vision, an enduring symbol of American exceptionalism cited by politicians from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan and Michael Dukakis, is gone. Religion is expunged from New York State's account of how this nation began.

Instead, the focus is on "Native Americans who eventually lost much of their land and experienced a drastic decline in population through diseases and armed conflict." The other focus is on slavery and indentured servitude. True, the curriculum includes political developments and democratic principles. But overall, it's so slanted as to be untrue.

The indoctrination begins early. In grade three, "students are introduced to the concepts of prejudice, discrimination and human rights, as well as social action." Grade four suggested reading includes "The Kid's Guide to Social Action."

Grade nine shortchanges the discovery of the Americas by European explorers, renaming it the dreary topic, "The Encounter." Students will "map the exchange of crops and animals and the spread of diseases across the world" due to the Encounter, and study "the decimation of indigenous populations in the Americas" and the "the impact of the Atlantic slave trade on Africa, including the development of the kingdoms of the Ashanti and Dahomey."

Common Core was invented five years ago by a handful of Washington based education "experts" and bankrolled by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But it took off when the Obama administration put into the stimulus bill $4.3 billion in state education grants called Race to the Top.

President Obama's education secretary, Arne Duncan, made it clear the surest way for states to qualify was to adopt Common Core. Some states took it sight unseen, since the first grant applications were due in January 2010, and the standards were not written until months later. New York adopted Common Core in July 2010, in return for $697 million.

All in all, 45 states signed on to a program that had never been tested in even one school. What pomposity.Common Core eliminates handwriting, the basis of communication for over two thousand years. Students learn to print in kindergarten and first grade, but then instruction shifts to keyboards. The next generation will not be able to read an historical document in its original, or even a letter from Grandma.

Worse, scientists warn this ignores the proven connection between writing and absorbing information. Kids will learn less and remember less.

Private schools and home schooling won't shield you if you want your children to compete for college. ACT and SAT tests are already being aligned with Common Core. This is a No Exit system.But what's most at stake is truth. Novelist George Orwell warned in "1984" how distorting history destroyed freedom: "The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth."

Elizabeth Warren Is Wrong. Big Government Programs Will Just Increase College Costs

Congress has long tried to help students afford a college education. It has cut interest rates on federal student loans, vastly expanded federal lending and lifted caps on borrowing. In the 1980s, it even let parents borrow directly from the feds — through the Parent PLUS program — to pay for their children’s college.

None of this has reduced college costs. Indeed, some argue this open spigot of federal funds has enabled universities to increase tuition and fees.

Enter Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The Massachusetts Democrat is proposing that the U.S. Department of Education’s Direct Loan Program be expanded to refinance both public and private student loans. The feds would pay off private lenders and issue low-interest government loans to take their place.

It sounds appealing. Yet the policy is problematic for private lenders, students and taxpayers — the ones who foot the bill for all this federal largesse.

Private lenders must already compete with artificially low (i.e., taxpayer-subsidized) interest rates on federal loans. And as Jordan Weissmann noted in Slate: “Since pre-payments equal a loss to the [private] lender, Washington would essentially be seizing their profits.”

The Congressional Budget Office also predicts that the Warren bill would “lead more individuals to opt for the longer repayment terms and the possibility of eventual loan forgiveness that are features of the income-based repayment plans offered under current law.”

The Obama administration issued regulations last November capping what students can be required to pay at just 10 percent of discretionary income, and offering loan forgiveness after just 20 years (just 10 years for those in public service jobs).

And on Monday, President Obama issued an executive order extending the “Pay As You Earn” option to 5 million previously ineligible borrowers who took out student loans prior to 2007.

And then there are the taxpayers, who stand to take it on the chin in several ways. First, Ms. Warren would finance her loan expansion through the ever-popular “millionaire’s tax” — in this case, a levy on individuals earning between $1 million and $2 million. Eventually, those thresholds would be indexed to inflation.

How much will the loan refinancing cost taxpayers? We don’t really know. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that refinancing — along with the millionaire’s tax — would actually increase federal revenues by $72.5 billion over the first 10 years. But — and this is a huge “but” — that estimate does not take into account actual market risk.

As the budget office has explained in previous analyses, “The government is exposed to market risk when the economy is weak because borrowers default on their debt obligations more frequently and recoveries from borrowers are lower.” A fair-value estimate of Ms. Warren’s proposal would account for that risk, producing a more accurate reflection of the true cost of her proposal. But the budget office has yet to issue a fair-value analysis of the refinancing proposal.

Ultimately, simply refinancing student loans and increasing federal subsidies can do nothing to solve the college cost problem. And it certainly won’t encourage colleges to keep costs in check.

Federal higher education subsidies shift the responsibility of paying for college from the student, who directly benefits from attending college, to the taxpayer. Moreover, transferring the burden of student loan financing from university graduates to taxpayers — three-quarters of whom do not hold bachelor’s degrees — is inequitable. After all, college grads on average will earn significantly more over the course of a lifetime than those without a college degree.

If Congress is interested in reining in college costs, increasing federal loans and grants will never achieve that goal. Thankfully, there are innovative proposals on the table that would.

Sen. Mike Lee, Utah Republican, has introduced a proposal that would fundamentally restructure accreditation — a reform that holds the prospect of dramatically reducing college costs, while increasing access to higher education for aspiring students.

By contrast, Ms. Warren’s refinancing proposal does nothing for current and future students. It only serves to further burden taxpayers, and to give universities license to hike tuition and fees even higher.

The job market and student loan debt had lawmakers waxing philosophical at today’s Conversations with Conservatives event on Capitol Hill.

“When I graduated from undergrad, I had a degree in Spanish literature and a minor in philosophy. I knew I wasn’t going to get a job,” Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, said. In fact, he joked, “I was not marketable at all, so I had to run for Congress.”

Actually, the Idaho Republican recalled, he paid his way through college and law school, taking multiple jobs to afford the cost of higher education. Although he was accepted into the prestigious Georgetown University law school, he instead chose to enroll in the University of Washington’s School of Law because it was one-third the price.

“You’ve got to make those decisions for yourself,” Labrador said. “You shouldn’t be expecting the government to be subsiding everything that you’re going to be doing in your life.”

Although he took a lighthearted approach to the debate over the burden of student loan debt, Labrador and his colleagues had a serious message for millennials: President Obama’s policies are making it more difficult for young Americans to prosper.

“Young people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama have a higher unemployment rate today than they did before Obama was president of the United States,” Labrador said. “They have fewer opportunities for growth, their education loans are higher, and they’re having fewer opportunities to go out there in the marketplace.”

Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., agreed, and encouraged millennials to work part-time jobs to front the cost of education and get real-world experience.

“The added benefit of actually working while you’re going to school,” Salmon said, “is that when you graduate, you actually have some marketable skills in addition to your sheepskin.”

When The Daily Signal asked about Obama’s reference to “millionaires” helping to retire loan debt in his remarks yesterday at the White House, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, said the president’s rhetoric is an attempt to drum up support before the midterm elections.

“We have this massive VA scandal, and he is out talking about the executive actions, trying to distract the public from a failed economy, failed situation at the VA.”

Huelskamp added: “I think he’s trying to make himself relevant in a town he should be fixing.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., argued that part of the problem with prevailing trends in American education is that “we boost up people’s self-esteem and tell them they can be whatever they want—they can major in anything they want.”

But in his district, Massie said, employers are “crying” for more qualified employees.

“We send [young people] to college without asking them to look at their employment prospects with their degrees,” the Kentucky Republican said. “This is an area where there needs to be some personal accountability and responsibility.”

His advice to college-bound millennials? “Do not major in political science.”

Anyone sending their kids to college nowadays or paying off their student loans has probably noticed that the costs are out of control.

In fact, tuition is consistently outstripping the growth of incomes. Since 1976, annual college tuition public and private has increased 1,056 percent — from $924 to a current level of $10,683, according to the Department of Education. That is more than 7 percent growth a year.

Meanwhile, household median income has increased just 302 percent, or 4 percent a year, from $12,686 to the current level of $51,017, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The risk of going to college is that increasingly you might not find a job that pays for it at the end of the rainbow.

In fact, nearly half of four-year college graduates say they are not even working in professions that require a bachelor’s degree, according to a 2013 study of 4,900 college graduates by McKinsey & Co. Another third said that college had not prepared them properly for the working world.

As it stands now, annual tuition is about $10,000, and growing at an average rate of 7 percent a year. In just 14 years, holding to the historical average, annual tuition should be about $26,000 a year, or $104,000 for four years. Just for tuition, not room, board, and books.

Include those, and the annual cost, now at about $20,000, could be about $51,000 a year, or $204,000 for the four year haul. Meanwhile, wages will not keep up.

With costs outpacing the ability to repay — and the value of the degree itself diminishing — that can only mean fewer choices for our children than we had, a prospect that is not only deeply saddening for parents, but alarming as a nation that once called itself the “land of opportunity.”

The reason for the skyrocketing costs? The student loan program.

Creating artificial demand for something, in this case college, drives costs to the moon. The same thing happened recently with housing. The Freddie Mac Home Price Index from 1976-2006 grew at an average annual rate of 6.17 percent, again outpacing incomes. Unlimited financing boosted demand and sent prices spiraling upward.

But that’s not stopping politicians in Washington, D.C. from doubling down. In fact, this week, the Senate is debating an expansion of the student loan program.

That is largely the story of the financial crisis, wherein credit, and thus asset prices, grew faster than the ability of households, financial institutions, and everybody else to repay the principal. All the while, policy makers sought ways to further blow up the bubble.

Now, we see deleveraging across the board after the bubble popped, but one area where this has not happened, yet, is in student loan debt.

The reason is because the near limitless federal financing remains in place, because default is impossible, and because unlike housing, there is no private market feedback at financial institutions despite an extremely high delinquency rate on student loans.

The fact is, minus these loan programs, college would much cheaper, and housing would be more affordable.

Sure, fewer people would go on to obtain college degrees without the financing. But, in an alternate universe, markets could have handled post-secondary school education and training without the debt. Institutions would find other ways to offer economically viable skills that could be paid for out of pocket or through increased savings.

Another benefit of ending the program is that costs for those who actually do need to go to school for the skills that were acquired would be kept under control. This would have net benefits throughout the economy. The cost of a medical degree being cheaper would lead to lower health care costs, for instance.

Instead, what we’re doing is leading directly to a higher cost of labor for U.S. employees. So, if you’re a computer programmer, an American, with $50,000 of student loan debt, and you’re competing against someone from India with zero student loan debt, who’s more able to compete on cost?

Even so, that’s not stopping students from continuing to go to school, with the National Center for Education Statistics projecting college enrollment to increase 14 percent to 24 million by 2022.

It’s called a perverse incentive for a reason. If you want to get ahead, economically speaking, based on labor statistics, you’re better off going to college with comparatively lower unemployment rates. And if you want to afford college nowadays, you’ll be hard-pressed to do so without taking on the debt.

But, watch out, even if you go through all of the trouble, as the years go on, it will become even more difficult to compete in the current global environment. It’s simultaneously a catch 22 and a cycle of diminishing returns.

Ostensibly, in the cases of housing and education, the purpose of all this federal credit allocation is to achieve social ends. But, over time the negatives have begun to outweigh the positives. We’re seeing very bad outcomes for millions of people who are taking on the debt. It’s a policy issue that we’ve gotten horribly wrong in the past 30 years.

Without federal credit driven education and housing — we might find that a similar standard of living could be sustained at far lower, nominal wages.

In the very least, loans could be allocated based on an ability to repay given chosen fields of study. People would adjust their behavior accordingly, and only go to school for professions that actively require degrees. Institutions would adjust their prices. The truth is, there is zero risk calculus in making student loans. That has to change.

Instead, we’re becoming poorer with all of this debt, going broke paying a highly inflated premium for things those who truly need it could pay for themselves. We may be more educated as a nation, but we sure are dumb.

Children taught to read using traditional methods are more than two years ahead of their peers, figures show, despite fears large numbers of schools shun the approach in favour of more “progressive” teaching.

Research shows that phonics can boost children’s reading age by an average of 28 months by the time they turn seven.

Boys benefit the most from the back-to-basics system – in which words are broken down into their constituent parts – and actually overtake girls after just two years of school, it emerged.

The disclosure was made as more than 500,000 children in England prepare to sit a phonics test this week – marking out those who struggle to read.

Pupils are supposed to accurately decode a list of 40 words, including a number of nonsense terms such as "voo", "spron" and "terg".

For the first time this year, teachers will not be told in advance where the pass mark has been set because of concerns that many pupils have been given a “helping hand” in the past.

An analysis of results last year showed that pupils’ scores dramatically spiked at 32 – the exact result needed to pass in 2013.

Teaching unions have been strongly resistant to the test, claiming it risks labelling children who struggle as “failures” at a young age.

It is also claimed that staff should be free to use a combination of reading methods to more accurately tailor classes to individual children’s needs.

This includes the “look and say" approach where children learn whole words on sight before gradually picking up the ability to recognise letter sounds.

Writing in The Telegraph, Nick Gibb, the former Conservative schools minister, said there “remains a hard core of believers” in “progressive” methods, with two-thirds of those responding to a recent survey advocating alternative approaches alongside phonics.

Mr Gibb said this amounted to a “daunting and confusing experience” for pupils, adding: “The ‘variety of methods’ approach makes learning to read a far more difficult task than needs to be the case. And it’s the least academic and least advantaged children who suffer most from this unnecessary struggle.”

He said: “We won’t achieve the levels of literacy in this country that we need until all schools understand the research behind this debate and adopt methods that have been proven to work.”

In a study, Dr Marlynne Grant, an educational psychologist, analysed the performance of pupils from a Roman Catholic primary school who were taught to read using synthetic phonics from the reception year upwards. The school was designated for children from Irish traveller families and had high levels of special educational needs.

The research found that by the time children reached year two – aged seven – they had a reading age 28 months ahead of what would normally be expected. They were also 21 months ahead in spelling.

Some children were so advanced that they could read as well as the average 13-year-old, it emerged.

The poorest children were an average of two years above their chronological reading age compared with other deprived children, while boys were three years ahead of national averages.

Dr Grant, a committee member of the Reading Reform Foundation, said: “The message from this research is clear – if you are delivering systematic synthetic phonics in a rigorous way, these are the kind of results you can get.

“Starting children on phonics in reception means many children will become strong readers quickly, and that you can identify those struggling early on, and then ensure they get the help they need to catch up.”

A Department for Education spokesman said: “In the past, far too many children left primary school unable to read properly and continued to struggle in secondary school and beyond.

“The phonics check is allowing teachers to identify children struggling at an early age so they can receive the extra help they need before it is too late.”

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Obama’s Approach to Student Loans Hurts Millennials

The job market and student loan debt had lawmakers waxing philosophical at today’s Conversations with Conservatives event on Capitol Hill.

“When I graduated from undergrad, I had a degree in Spanish literature and a minor in philosophy. I knew I wasn’t going to get a job,” Rep. Raúl Labrador, R-Idaho, said. In fact, he joked, “I was not marketable at all, so I had to run for Congress.”

Actually, the Idaho Republican recalled, he paid his way through college and law school, taking multiple jobs to afford the cost of higher education. Although he was accepted into the prestigious Georgetown University law school, he instead chose to enroll in the University of Washington’s School of Law because it was one-third the price.

“You’ve got to make those decisions for yourself,” Labrador said. “You shouldn’t be expecting the government to be subsiding everything that you’re going to be doing in your life.”

Although he took a lighthearted approach to the debate over the burden of student loan debt, Labrador and his colleagues had a serious message for millennials: President Obama’s policies are making it more difficult for young Americans to prosper.

“Young people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama have a higher unemployment rate today than they did before Obama was president of the United States,” Labrador said. “They have fewer opportunities for growth, their education loans are higher, and they’re having fewer opportunities to go out there in the marketplace.”

Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz., agreed, and encouraged millennials to work part-time jobs to front the cost of education and get real-world experience.

“The added benefit of actually working while you’re going to school,” Salmon said, “is that when you graduate, you actually have some marketable skills in addition to your sheepskin.”

When The Daily Signal asked about Obama’s reference to “millionaires” helping to retire loan debt in his remarks yesterday at the White House, Rep. Tim Huelskamp, R-Kansas, said the president’s rhetoric is an attempt to drum up support before the midterm elections.

“We have this massive VA scandal, and he is out talking about the executive actions, trying to distract the public from a failed economy, failed situation at the VA.”

Huelskamp added: “I think he’s trying to make himself relevant in a town he should be fixing.”

Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., argued that part of the problem with prevailing trends in American education is that “we boost up people’s self-esteem and tell them they can be whatever they want—they can major in anything they want.”

But in his district, Massie said, employers are “crying” for more qualified employees.

“We send [young people] to college without asking them to look at their employment prospects with their degrees,” the Kentucky Republican said. “This is an area where there needs to be some personal accountability and responsibility.”

His advice to college-bound millennials? “Do not major in political science.”

Anyone sending their kids to college nowadays or paying off their student loans has probably noticed that the costs are out of control.

In fact, tuition is consistently outstripping the growth of incomes. Since 1976, annual college tuition public and private has increased 1,056 percent — from $924 to a current level of $10,683, according to the Department of Education. That is more than 7 percent growth a year.

Meanwhile, household median income has increased just 302 percent, or 4 percent a year, from $12,686 to the current level of $51,017, according to data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The risk of going to college is that increasingly you might not find a job that pays for it at the end of the rainbow.

In fact, nearly half of four-year college graduates say they are not even working in professions that require a bachelor’s degree, according to a 2013 study of 4,900 college graduates by McKinsey & Co. Another third said that college had not prepared them properly for the working world.

As it stands now, annual tuition is about $10,000, and growing at an average rate of 7 percent a year. In just 14 years, holding to the historical average, annual tuition should be about $26,000 a year, or $104,000 for four years. Just for tuition, not room, board, and books.

Include those, and the annual cost, now at about $20,000, could be about $51,000 a year, or $204,000 for the four year haul. Meanwhile, wages will not keep up.

With costs outpacing the ability to repay — and the value of the degree itself diminishing — that can only mean fewer choices for our children than we had, a prospect that is not only deeply saddening for parents, but alarming as a nation that once called itself the “land of opportunity.”

The reason for the skyrocketing costs? The student loan program.

Creating artificial demand for something, in this case college, drives costs to the moon. The same thing happened recently with housing. The Freddie Mac Home Price Index from 1976-2006 grew at an average annual rate of 6.17 percent, again outpacing incomes. Unlimited financing boosted demand and sent prices spiraling upward.

But that’s not stopping politicians in Washington, D.C. from doubling down. In fact, this week, the Senate is debating an expansion of the student loan program.

That is largely the story of the financial crisis, wherein credit, and thus asset prices, grew faster than the ability of households, financial institutions, and everybody else to repay the principal. All the while, policy makers sought ways to further blow up the bubble.

Now, we see deleveraging across the board after the bubble popped, but one area where this has not happened, yet, is in student loan debt.

The reason is because the near limitless federal financing remains in place, because default is impossible, and because unlike housing, there is no private market feedback at financial institutions despite an extremely high delinquency rate on student loans.

The fact is, minus these loan programs, college would much cheaper, and housing would be more affordable.

Sure, fewer people would go on to obtain college degrees without the financing. But, in an alternate universe, markets could have handled post-secondary school education and training without the debt. Institutions would find other ways to offer economically viable skills that could be paid for out of pocket or through increased savings.

Another benefit of ending the program is that costs for those who actually do need to go to school for the skills that were acquired would be kept under control. This would have net benefits throughout the economy. The cost of a medical degree being cheaper would lead to lower health care costs, for instance.

Instead, what we’re doing is leading directly to a higher cost of labor for U.S. employees. So, if you’re a computer programmer, an American, with $50,000 of student loan debt, and you’re competing against someone from India with zero student loan debt, who’s more able to compete on cost?

Even so, that’s not stopping students from continuing to go to school, with the National Center for Education Statistics projecting college enrollment to increase 14 percent to 24 million by 2022.

It’s called a perverse incentive for a reason. If you want to get ahead, economically speaking, based on labor statistics, you’re better off going to college with comparatively lower unemployment rates. And if you want to afford college nowadays, you’ll be hard-pressed to do so without taking on the debt.

But, watch out, even if you go through all of the trouble, as the years go on, it will become even more difficult to compete in the current global environment. It’s simultaneously a catch 22 and a cycle of diminishing returns.

Ostensibly, in the cases of housing and education, the purpose of all this federal credit allocation is to achieve social ends. But, over time the negatives have begun to outweigh the positives. We’re seeing very bad outcomes for millions of people who are taking on the debt. It’s a policy issue that we’ve gotten horribly wrong in the past 30 years.

Without federal credit driven education and housing — we might find that a similar standard of living could be sustained at far lower, nominal wages.

In the very least, loans could be allocated based on an ability to repay given chosen fields of study. People would adjust their behavior accordingly, and only go to school for professions that actively require degrees. Institutions would adjust their prices. The truth is, there is zero risk calculus in making student loans. That has to change.

Instead, we’re becoming poorer with all of this debt, going broke paying a highly inflated premium for things those who truly need it could pay for themselves. We may be more educated as a nation, but we sure are dumb.

Children taught to read using traditional methods are more than two years ahead of their peers, figures show, despite fears large numbers of schools shun the approach in favour of more “progressive” teaching.

Research shows that phonics can boost children’s reading age by an average of 28 months by the time they turn seven.

Boys benefit the most from the back-to-basics system – in which words are broken down into their constituent parts – and actually overtake girls after just two years of school, it emerged.

The disclosure was made as more than 500,000 children in England prepare to sit a phonics test this week – marking out those who struggle to read.

Pupils are supposed to accurately decode a list of 40 words, including a number of nonsense terms such as "voo", "spron" and "terg".

For the first time this year, teachers will not be told in advance where the pass mark has been set because of concerns that many pupils have been given a “helping hand” in the past.

An analysis of results last year showed that pupils’ scores dramatically spiked at 32 – the exact result needed to pass in 2013.

Teaching unions have been strongly resistant to the test, claiming it risks labelling children who struggle as “failures” at a young age.

It is also claimed that staff should be free to use a combination of reading methods to more accurately tailor classes to individual children’s needs.

This includes the “look and say" approach where children learn whole words on sight before gradually picking up the ability to recognise letter sounds.

Writing in The Telegraph, Nick Gibb, the former Conservative schools minister, said there “remains a hard core of believers” in “progressive” methods, with two-thirds of those responding to a recent survey advocating alternative approaches alongside phonics.

Mr Gibb said this amounted to a “daunting and confusing experience” for pupils, adding: “The ‘variety of methods’ approach makes learning to read a far more difficult task than needs to be the case. And it’s the least academic and least advantaged children who suffer most from this unnecessary struggle.”

He said: “We won’t achieve the levels of literacy in this country that we need until all schools understand the research behind this debate and adopt methods that have been proven to work.”

In a study, Dr Marlynne Grant, an educational psychologist, analysed the performance of pupils from a Roman Catholic primary school who were taught to read using synthetic phonics from the reception year upwards. The school was designated for children from Irish traveller families and had high levels of special educational needs.

The research found that by the time children reached year two – aged seven – they had a reading age 28 months ahead of what would normally be expected. They were also 21 months ahead in spelling.

Some children were so advanced that they could read as well as the average 13-year-old, it emerged.

The poorest children were an average of two years above their chronological reading age compared with other deprived children, while boys were three years ahead of national averages.

Dr Grant, a committee member of the Reading Reform Foundation, said: “The message from this research is clear – if you are delivering systematic synthetic phonics in a rigorous way, these are the kind of results you can get.

“Starting children on phonics in reception means many children will become strong readers quickly, and that you can identify those struggling early on, and then ensure they get the help they need to catch up.”

A Department for Education spokesman said: “In the past, far too many children left primary school unable to read properly and continued to struggle in secondary school and beyond.

“The phonics check is allowing teachers to identify children struggling at an early age so they can receive the extra help they need before it is too late.”

Monday, June 16, 2014

Australian parents are keen to escape the disrupted classes that are a frequent feature of State schools. So 40% of Australian teenagers go to private High Schools

The stampede from public primary schools to private high schools when a child finishes year 6 is a tradition in parts of Sydney, but principals say the exodus now starts as early as year 2 as parents panic they will miss out on their school of choice.

Census data shows that in some of Sydney's most affluent suburbs, especially the eastern suburbs, as few as 20 per cent of students stay in the public system for high school despite booming enrolments in public primary schools.

The president of the NSW Primary Principals' Association, Geoff Scott, said the exodus from public to private schools had traditionally started in year 5 but principals were reporting it now began as early as year 2.

"It's getting younger and younger and we have parents telling our principals, 'Sorry, we love your school but if we want to get our child into a certain independent school we have been told we have to enrol them in year 3,' " Mr Scott said.

"Parents feel, wrongly we believe, that their children will have a better chance if they go to a non-government school, but this is not based on better teachers or a different curriculum because we know parents are very happy with their local government primary school."

The principal of Waverley Public, Glenn Levett, raised the issue of the exodus in a note to parents on the school's website, where he urged them not to judge the school on NAPLAN results alone, especially because so many students leave the public system before the end of primary school.

"Our year 5 group often becomes a small cohort of students as a number of students move on to opportunity classes or private schools at the end of year 4," the school’s website says. "This is common practice in the eastern suburbs as a majority of students in the area attend private high schools."

Nikki Shepherd, who has twin boys Sam and Alfie, and Carol Wade, who has a son Joseph, both enrolled their children in year 5 at Waverley College this year.

The boys, who were young for their year when they started kindergarten at Coogee Public School, are repeating year 5 at the Catholic college after doing year 5 at Coogee last year.

Ms Wade said she had been very happy with their local public school but felt her son would benefit from more routine and discipline by doing year 5 and 6 at Waverley College.

Both families would have also been unlikely to secure a spot for the boys for year 7 because they are not Catholic.

The acting director of Waverley College's junior school, Greg Harris, said the school had just been through one of the "most difficult" enrolment processes because of the demand for its year 5 intake.

Mr Harris said the school had "well over" 200 applications for 145 year 5 spots next year and one-third of those applicants were non-Catholic.

The trend is not unique to the eastern suburbs.

Inner west mother Elizabeth Luff sent her children to Annandale Public until year 4 but then sent them to St Andrews Cathedral School in Sydney's central business district.

Mrs Luff said she had always intended to send them to St Andrews for high school but thought starting them in year 5 would help them move to year 7 more easily.

1985—In Jenkins v. Missouri, federal district judge Russell G. Clark launches his desegregation plan for the Kansas City (Missouri) school district—a plan that will become (according to the description embraced by Chief Justice Rehnquist) the “most ambitious and expensive remedial program in the history of school desegregation.” Over the next twelve years, Clark will (as this report summarizes it) order the state of Missouri and the school district to spend nearly two billion dollars for “higher teachers’ salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal.”

The results will, however, prove dismal: “Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.”

Here’s a paragraph from a long, not very interesting article in the NYT about a 9-year-old Haitian boy’s struggles with not flunking out of of New York schools:

"The Common Core, the most significant change to American public education in a generation, was hailed by the Obama administration as a way of lifting achievement at low-performing schools. After decades of rote learning, children would become nimble thinkers equipped for the modern age, capable of unraveling improper fractions and drawing connections between Lincoln and Pericles."

“After decades of rote learning …”

Which decades? The 1810s to 1840s? Is Mr. Gradgrind still the most influential educational philosopher of our day?

This reflects a general pattern: liberals have a hard time remembering that they’ve been in charge of a lot of things, such as education and race, for decades, even generations now.

"FBI raids last week targeting Concept Schools included the charter-school operator’s Des Plaines headquarters and a school in Rogers Park.

FBI agents flashed their badges and entered after normal business hours on June 4 at Concept’s offices at 2250 E. Devon Ave. in Des Plaines, Kesha Dunn, an administrator for the O’Hare Lake Office Park that includes the chain’s headquarters, said Thursday.

The same day, agents with a search warrant visited Concept’s Chicago Math and Science Academy at 7212 N. Clark St. in Rogers Park.

“We have no idea” what they were looking for, said Irene Bermudez, a spokeswoman for the school, known as CMSA. “Of course, we cooperated. They were incredibly polite — not like in the movies. We’re conducting business as usual.”

A special agent in the Cleveland FBI office that’s leading the probe said earlier this week that the raids at 19 Concept campuses — in Illinois, Indiana and Ohio — were part of an investigation of an “ongoing white-collar crime matter” but would give no details and would not identify the schools.

FBI agents also sought records from Quest Charter Academy, a Concept school in Peoria, according to administrators of the school. They said the federal agents “disclosed they were searching for information on a federal program called E-Rate,” which provides funding for schools for telecommunications and Internet access.

“The officials also identified certain external individuals/entities in which they were interested,” according to a written statement from the Quest officials. …"

CMSA gets about 92 percent of its $6 million annual budget from taxpayers, most of that through per-pupil funding from CPS.A reader points out that if you go to the Concept charter schools website, you can read:

"Back in 1999, a small group of educators, engineers and academicians founded Horizon Science Academy Cleveland and Horizon Science Academy Columbus in Ohio. The group, which included Turkish American educators, developed what has evolved into a proven successful school design that Concept implements in all of its schools today. Part of this visionary team was our current CEO, Sedat Duman, and Vice President, Salim Ucan."

In other words, these are Gulenist charter schools under the leadership of Imam Gulen in exile in the Poconos, whom I wrote about in Taki’s Magazine back on New Year’s Day. The Turkish cult is the biggest operator of charter schools in America, taking in over a half billion dollars per year of American taxpayer money.

It would be interesting to know whether the CIA is mad at the FBI for raiding the Gulen cult’s funding sources? Presumably, Imam Gulen is in America for roughly the same reason the Tsarnaev family was in America: Deep Staters like Graham Fuller see Gulen and the Bomb Brothers’ Uncle Ruslan as potential Major Players back home in the Islamic world. But wouldn’t it be better for the CIA to just give Imam Gulen money out of its own budget rather than have Gulen skim it off the education of American children?

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Did This Student Receive a Bad Grade on a College Paper Because She Cited Heritage Foundation?

Hayley Waring, a student at Southern Methodist University, has an opinion piece in The College Conservative about former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s commencement address last month at Harvard. Mayor Bloomberg criticized left-wing censorship of conservative ideas on campus. Waring said Bloomberg is correct and discussed her own experience at SMU:

“Last semester, I took a public policy class with a professor who often let her left-leaning views leak into her lectures while assuring us she would keep her personal bias a secret. A large portion of my final grade relied on a term paper due at the end of the semester; I received a 67 on that paper.

Upset and confused, I sought my professor, asking for an explanation. She brushed me off explaining that I’d gone a bit off topic. A bit off topic? Sure, a paper that strays from the topic assigned should be docked a few points. But being given a nearly failing grade didn’t seem fair to me, especially considering the fact I didn’t actually venture off topic.

I continued to email her and visit her office, asking her to reconsider the grade. Ultimately, she did, and she raised the grade to an 87. Essentially, she raised my grade by 20 points, and I never changed a single word in the paper. I’ve always had a feeling that the original grade might have been directly related to the fact that the majority of my research came from the Heritage Foundation.”

Colleges are supposed to be places of free inquiry and debate. In public schools, particularly public colleges, students are protected by the First Amendment. But even at private colleges such as Harvard and SMU, students expect and deserve to be allowed to think for themselves.

Yet, too often, the free speech student radicals of the 1960s—today’s graying college professors—seek to suppress conservative speech rather than engage with it intellectually. Bloomberg likened this situation to “McCarthyism.” Yet shutting down the free speech of today’s students is worse than McCarthyism. Sen. Joseph McCarthy was fighting against those who sought to violently overthrow the American government, and declassified intelligence reports now show that many of his accusations in the 1950s were not unfounded.

By contrast, today’s students are not trying to violently overthrow anything—they are seeking to learn and express themselves peacefully. Using Heritage research, passing out Heritage pocket Constitutions, even being a part of the Heritage Young Leaders Program—these are not the sort of thing that should draw reduced grades from professors.

Cases like these make it all the more important that students educate themselves about the Constitution and about the First Principles that make America great. Take a few minutes to do so. The next time you find yourself staring down a college professor, you’ll be glad you did.

'Cheating teachers have lost morality': Dirty tricks on the rise to boost British exam grades

Teachers have lost their ‘morality’ and are cheating in exams and coursework to boost pupils’ grades, an expert has claimed.

Professor Robert Coe said teachers were falling into ‘bad behaviour’ because they believed other schools were bending the rules.

It coincided with revelations that whistleblowers reported teachers for telling students what to write and completing coursework for them.

There are even claims of staff employing external consultants to finish projects.

In a separate move, exams watchdog Ofqual this week opened an unprecedented anonymous online survey that urges teachers to report experiences of improper tactics or cheating.

The questions detail some 30 strategies thought to be used to boost results.

Professor Coe, an expert in exams at Durham University and an Ofqual adviser, said: ‘I think there is a big issue about morality here, professional morality and how we have lost sight of the bigger picture.

‘It is kind of [seen as] OK to do things you know are wrong because everyone else is doing them: “Because I need to for the sake of my school surviving Ofsted.”

'Bad behaviour drives out the good – if other people are doing it, it is much harder to resist,’ he told the Westminster Education Forum in London.

The former teacher also suggested coursework marks could be capped according to pupils’ exam scores, the Times Educational Supplement said.

He called for more support for whistleblowers, saying: ‘When there is cheating, people know there is cheating. So why don’t they tell us about it?

'Partly because there are some strong incentives for them not to, but also because there isn’t really a mechanism.’

Freedom of Information disclosures show Ofqual has received 73 complaints from whistleblowers since April 2012, many about controlled assessments – coursework done under exam conditions in class.

The complaints range from inflated grades to altered marks in spoken exams.

One said pupils were ‘told what to write’ and another complained of ‘inappropriate granting of extra time by the school’ during an A-level.

Education Secretary Michael Gove’s GCSE and A-level reforms substantially reduce controlled assessments. But some subjects will still need coursework to test skills not assessed in written exams.

Ofqual will use its survey – which runs until July 18 – to cut out loopholes as it finalises the new-look exams.

It asks about practices such as pupils learning mark schemes, the ‘hot housing’ of borderline students, and giving ‘hints’.

Glenys Stacey, the head of Ofqual, said it had ‘heard increasingly . . . that certain approaches are used which create unfair advantages’.

Insisting the survey was ‘not condemnatory’, she said: ‘We want teachers to be open and honest with us . . . How much assistance are you going to give a child?

Kid Twirls a Pencil in Class, N.J. Threatens to Take Him From His Dad and Requires Blood and Urine Testing

In April, Ethan Chaplin was twirling his pencil in class when another kid—a bully, according to Chaplin—called out: "He's making gun motions, send him to juvie!"

The 13-year-old was yanked out of school and thereby commenced his 15 minutes of fame as sites like Huffington Post, as well as local cable news stations, took up his cause arguing that a suspension for pencil twirling was zero tolerance run amok.

The Vernon Township school district's interim superintendent claimed Ethan had never been suspended, but conceded he had been out of school for two days, telling the New Jersey Herald:

"The story that we expelled or suspended a student is partially not true ... We did exclude" the student from attending until a proper psychological evaluation was done, interim Vernon Superintendent Charles Maranzano [said.]...

If a student "demonstrates odd behaviors, non-conforming behaviors, it causes us to take a closer look," he told the newspaper. "If a student gestures or demonstrates behavior that could be construed as a threat to others in a classroom... then that's also a trigger for us."

Ethan was back in class quickly, but too often these zero tolerance cases have second- and third-order effects. In Ethan's case, long after they thought the incident was resolved, his dad received some very scary paperwork from the state of New Jersey threatening to revoke his custody rights:

Ethan's father [Michael] received startling communication from New Jersey's Department of Child Protection and Permanency and Department of Children and Families.

"I received a letter from them saying they had found an incident of abuse or neglect regarding Ethan because I refused to take him for psychological evaluation," Michael said.

Panicked by the letter, Ethan's parents took him in for the evaluation, where he was required to give blood and urine samples.

No troubling psychological conditions were found (unless they've recently added "being an annoying fidget" to the DSM) but now the Chaplin family will likely endure a period of uncertainty and perhaps even home visits from social workers with the power to take away Ethan at any time.

Meanwhile, 13-year-olds may be idiots sometimes, but they're not dumb. Remember, the whole incident was triggered by a kid savvy enough to know that raising the specter of even a fake gun is a powerful weapon in the bullying wars.

Background

Primarily covering events in Australia, the U.K. and the USA -- where the follies are sadly similar.

The only qualification you really need for any job is: "Can you do it?"

Particularly in academe, Leftism is motivated by a feeling of superiority, a feeling that they know best. But how fragile that claim clearly is when they do so much to suppress expression of conservative ideas. Academic Leftists, despite their pretensions, cannot withstand open debate about ideas. In those circumstances, their pretenses are contemptible. I suspect that they are mostly aware of the vulnerability of their arguments but just NEED to feel superior

"The two most important questions in a society are: Who teaches our children? What are they teaching them?" - Plato

Keynes did get some things right. His comment on education seems positively prophetic: "Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent.”

"If you are able to compose sentences in Latin you will never write a dud sentence in English." -- Boris Johnson

"Common core" and its Australian equivalent was a good idea that was hijacked by the Left in an effort to make it "Leftist core". That made it "Rejected core"

TERMINOLOGY: The English "A Level" exam is roughly equivalent to a U.S. High School diploma. Rather confusingly, you can get As, Bs or Cs in your "A Level" results. Entrance to the better universities normally requires several As in your "A Levels".

The BIGGEST confusion in British terminology, however, surrounds use of the term "public school". Traditionally, a public school was where people who were rich but not rich enough to afford private tutors sent their kids. So a British public school is a fee-paying school. It is what Americans or Australians would call a private school. Brits are however aware of the confusion this causes benighted non-Brits so these days often in the media use "Independent" where once they would have used "public". The term for a taxpayer-supported school in Britain is a State school, but there are several varieties of those. The most common (and deplorable) type of State school is a "Comprehensive"

MORE TERMINOLOGY: Many of my posts mention the situation in Australia. Unlike the USA and Britain, there is virtually no local input into education in Australia. Education is mostly a State government responsibility, though the Feds have a lot of influence (via funding) at the university level. So it may be useful to know the usual abbreviations for the Australian States: QLD (Queensland), NSW (New South Wales), WA (Western Australia), VIC (Victoria), TAS (Tasmania), SA (South Australia).

There were two brothers from a famous family. One did very well at school while the other was a duffer. Which one went on the be acclaimed as the "Greatest Briton"? It was the duffer: Winston Churchill.

Another true modern parable: I have twin stepdaughters who are both attractive and exceptionally good-natured young women. I adore both of them. One got a university degree and the other was an abject failure at High School. One now works as a routine government clerk and is rather struggling financially. The other is extraordinarily highly paid and has an impressive property portfolio. Guess which one went to university? It was the former.

The above was written a couple of years ago and both women have moved on since then. The advantage to the "uneducated" one persists, however. She is living what many would see as a dream.

The current Left-inspired practice of going to great lengths to shield students from experience of failure and to tell students only good things about themselves is an appalling preparation for life. In adulthood, the vast majority of people are going to have to reconcile themselves to mundane jobs and no more than mediocrity in achievement. Illusions of themselves as "special" are going to be sorely disappointed

On June 6, 1944, a large number of young men charged ashore at Normandy beaches into a high probability of injury or death. Now, a large number of young people need safe spaces in case they might hear something that they don't like.

Perhaps it's some comfort that the idea of shielding kids from failure and having only "winners" is futile anyhow. When my son was about 3 years old he came bursting into the living room, threw himself down on the couch and burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong he said: "I can't always win!". The problem was that we had started him out on educational computer games where persistence only is needed to "win". But he had then started to play "real" computer games -- shootem-ups and the like. And you CAN lose in such games -- which he had just realized and become frustrated by. The upset lasted all of about 10 minutes, however and he has been happily playing computer games ever since. He also now has a First Class Honours degree in mathematics and is socially very pleasant. "Losing" certainly did not hurt him.

Even the famous Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (and the world's most famous Sardine) was a deep opponent of "progressive" educational methods. He wrote: "The most paradoxical aspect is that this new type of school is advocated as being democratic, while in fact it is destined not merely to perpetuate social differences, but to crystallise them." He rightly saw that "progressive" methods were no help to the poor

"Secretary [of Education] Bennett makes, I think, an interesting analogy. He says that if you serve a child a rotten hamburger in America, Federal, State, and local agencies will investigate you, summon you, close you down, whatever. But if you provide a child with a rotten education, nothing happens, except that you're liable to be given more money to do it with." -- Ronald Reagan

I am an atheist of Protestant background who sent his son to Catholic schools. Why did I do that? Because I do not personally feel threatened by religion and I think Christianity is a generally good influence. I also felt that religion is a major part of life and that my son should therefore have a good introduction to it. He enjoyed his religion lessons but seems to have acquired minimal convictions from them.

Why have Leftist educators so relentlessly and so long opposed the teaching of phonics as the path to literacy when that opposition has been so enormously destructive of the education of so many? It is because of their addiction to simplistic explanations of everything (as in saying that Islamic hostility is caused by "poverty" -- even though Osama bin Laden is a billionaire!). And the relationship between letters and sounds in English is anything but simple compared to the beautifully simple but very unhelpful formula "look and learn".

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

"Now, what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts. Nothing else will ever be of service to them ... Stick to Facts, sir!" So spake Mr Gradgrind, Dickens's dismal schoolteacher in Hard Times, published 1854. Mr Gradgrind was undoubtedly too narrow but the opposite extreme -- no facts -- would seem equally bad and is much closer to us than Mr Gradgrind's ideal

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

A a small quote from the past that helps explain the Leftist dominance of education: "When an opponent says: 'I will not come over to your side,' I calmly say, 'Your child belongs to us already. You will pass on. Your descendents, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time, they will know nothing else but this new community.'." Quote from Adolf Hitler. In a speech on 6th November 1933

I am rather pleased to report that I am a lifelong conservative. Out of intellectual curiosity, I did in my youth join organizations from right across the political spectrum so I am certainly not closed-minded and am very familiar with the full spectrum of political thinking. Nonetheless, I did not have to undergo the lurch from Left to Right that so many people undergo. At age 13 I used my pocket-money to subscribe to the "Reader's Digest" -- the main conservative organ available in small town Australia of the 1950s. I have learned much since but am pleased and amused to note that history has since confirmed most of what I thought at that early age.

I imagine that the the RD is still sending mailouts to my 1950s address!

Discipline: With their love of simple generalizations, this will be Greek to Leftists but I see an important role for discipline in education DESPITE the fact that my father never laid a hand on me once in my entire life nor have I ever laid a hand on my son in his entire life. The plain fact is that people are DIFFERENT, not equal and some kids will not behave themselves in response to persuasion alone. In such cases, realism requires that they be MADE to behave by whatever means that works -- not necessarily for their own benefit but certainly for the benefit of others whose opportunities they disrupt and destroy.

Popper in "Against Big Words": "Every intellectual has a very special responsibility. He has the privilege and the opportunity of studying. In return, he owes it to his fellow men (or 'to society') to represent the results of his study as simply, clearly and modestly as he can. The worst thing that intellectuals can do - the cardinal sin - is to try to set themselves up as great prophets vis-à-vis their fellow men and to impress them with puzzling philosophies. Anyone who cannot speak simply and clearly should say nothing and continue to work until he can do so."

Many newspaper articles are reproduced in full on this blog despite copyright claims attached to them. I believe that such reproductions here are protected by the "fair use" provisions of copyright law. Fair use is a legal doctrine that recognises that the monopoly rights protected by copyright laws are not absolute. The doctrine holds that, when someone uses a creative work in way that does not hurt the market for the original work and advances a public purpose - such as education or scholarship - it might be considered "fair" and not infringing.

Comments above from Brisbane, Australia by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former teacher at both High School and university level

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

NOTE: The archives provided by blogspot below are rather inconvenient. They break each month up into small bits. If you want to scan whole months at a time, the backup archives will suit better. See here or here